THE DEMONS AT RAINBOW BRIDGE
by Jack L. Chalker
For Cliff Simak,who loved the idea he partly inspired,but then didn’t stick aroundto see what I did with it.
The ship that roamed the sea of stars descended from heaven toward the blue-green eden below, as always, looking for the snake.
In the colorful terminology of Sector Mapping, the world below and its solar system were in the area labeled in the common language of interstellar commerce as Rainbow Bridge, after the sounds used to translate the X-Y plotting coordinates on a map. The words used for the symbols had no intrinsic meaning, and there was no indication that the union of these accidental words would be prophetic.
For nine days the small, crossbow-shaped scouting ship had lain off the planet, while its carefully laid satellites, like the eggs of a giant bird, had circled and crossed every square millimeter of the planet’s surface, photographing and mapping. Other eggs of a different sort had been sent first to the atmosphere to sample and test it and then gently to the ground in selected spots, and even on and under the great seas that, from a height, seemed to engulf and dominate the continental land masses. All of these sent a steady stream of data back to the mother ship, where computers compiled, checked, sorted, double-checked, and evaluated the flood of information received from its children.
The process could, in fact, have been totally automated, but very smart beings had learned over the years that you would never remember to program it for all eventualities, and that ships with their own artificial intelligence and full evaluative skills ultimately never seemed to have both a sense of aesthetics and the horse-trader’s know-how that could tell the measurably right from the commercially right. The ship could do it all on its own, but a second opinion from a different breed was always required.
The breed of living evaluators that accompanied the swift scout ships into those blank spots on the star charts known only by their colorful coordinates might have feathers or scales, fingers or tentacles, might have been hatched from an egg or grown from a pod; it might be male, female, neither, or all of the above, and while it usually breathed oxygen, it might well be more comfortable breathing water or methane or a half dozen other substances. For all that, it was a single breed, distinguished not by its form or race or birthright but by the fact that those of that breed called scout had to be of a singular mental bent.
It was a fact that all scouts were mad; the debate still raged as to whether the demands of the job drove them mad or whether they were mad at the start. In their pasts, most races had seemed to have a very small number of the breed no matter how different they otherwise were; these were the pathfinders, the wilderness explorers, the ones who pushed on alone into blanks on the maps. It had been suspected that some factor—anything from genetic engineering to just too much civilization—would breed them out of existence, and it was true that a few races now dominated the field, but, somehow, whenever someone discovered a new blank on some map, a scout always seemed to be there.
This one happened to be named Cymak, a bipedal creature of the basic Class II shape, with two arms and two legs and a thick torso. He also happened to have lumpy, mottled skin the color of rotted sewage, which was so thick some bullets wouldn’t penetrate it, and a triangular-shaped head that seemed to bob about as if it were on a spring rather than a segmented neck. His ancestors, before the age of synthetics, had fed on giant insect-like creatures by punching holes in them while they still lived and sucking out the fluids. He called himself and his physical race Xymonths, which, of course, basically translated as “human being,” like most of the exotic names that intelligent life forms called themselves. For terms like racial origin and planetary names the interstellar tongue deferred to the local one. Otherwise there would be several hundred “human beings” who considered all but their own kind “nonhuman,” and almost all of them would refer to the mother world of their races as “Earth.”
The triangular head bobbed and weaved like an unattended jack-in-the-box in the wind, as it looked over the data digests on the screens. So far, the data looked good. So far, in fact, it looked too good. Worlds well within the carbon-based life zone that contained a readily balanced oxygen-nitrogen mixture within half a per cent of optimum along with the proper water balance were quite rare. Normally you took what you found and then brought in an Exploiter Team to reengineer the world into something useful, or, even more frequently when these kinds of worlds were found, there was already some form of higher life calling it home.
Not here. There were vast forests and dense jungles all right, and high mountain ranges, and it was perhaps a tad too volcanic for absolute perfection, but so far the surveys had shown no signs of an indigenous race of sentient beings. Oh, you could find the basics there—creatures that took the ecological position of insects, some high-level herbivores and the inevitable carnivores preying on them and pruning their herds, and some rather odd ocean life as well, but nothing to show that anything higher than that had ever evolved here.
Of course, as Cymak knew well, you could never be a hundred per cent sure, even if you stayed a month. Intelligence came in the oddest packages and didn’t always fit the conventional molds. More than once he, and almost all the other scouts, had certified a world as “exploitable,” only to have Exploiter Teams later discover rather nasty surprises down there. That was what Exploiters got paid for.
Cymak’s job was to check the obvious. Structures, signs of environmental alteration, patterns that would show species dominance, that sort of thing. If there was any kind of real intelligence on this world, it wasn’t the conventional sort.
“There is an anomaly,” the ship’s computer reported to him. “I had a number of passes made when it showed up, just to make certain, and sent in the highest resolution photographic gear once it was isolated. It is on the east coast of the smaller continent in the northern hemisphere. It is definitely an artificial structure.”
“Just one?” The Xymanth responded.
“Yes. One structure on the entire planet.”
That was bad. Worse than a horde of screaming natives, in fact, because one could often do something even with a primitive population—but a single structure probably indicated that somebody else had found the place first.
“Identification?”
“Unknown. That is, the structure is of no known type either in the Exchange or in the Mycohl or Mizlaplan groups. In fact, I did not report it immediately because the readings it gave off indicated malfunctions in my own equipment.”
“Put up your best shots on the screens,” the scout instructed.
The screens blinked and then showed various passes in full three dimensions. Cymak immediately understood the ship’s problem—the artifact was unlike anything he’d ever seen before. In fact, the five views presented to him didn’t even look much like each other.
“These are not five separate structures? These are all views of the same single object?”
“One object, same coordinates. You can see why I suspected a defect. I checked for all known types of shielding and found nothing in the registers. As far as I can determine, there was nothing to filter or distort the shots you see. The material and basic dimensions, at least, are consistent.”
The first view showed a structure that resembled nothing so much as a great amber-colored crystal of fine quartz perhaps forty meters long, its various facets showing clearly, its far end apparently rounded, its near end coming to a multifaceted taper ending in a point. The second shot showed something the same size and color, but now it seemed concave, as if the top were turned inward. The third shot resembled the first, but the smooth sides of each facet were different, as if the damned thing had somehow turned. On the fourth there was no point, but rather a yawning cavity that seemed to reach back half the length of the thing. The fifth was the most disconcerting, with the object seemingly segmented into quarters, with each turned slightly off the other so that the facet walls were broken up and did not match.
“Well, something is causing distortion,” the Xymanth noted. “Unless that thing is alive and kicking. Composition?”
“Every analysis comes up with indistinct data,” the computer told him. “All I can tell you is that it is solid, appears to have some of the properties of glass or glassine plastic, that it is opaque, and that the substance does not appear to exist anywhere else on the planet, either artificially or naturally. There are indications of a low yield energy source there but little else. It is effectively dead to all remote analytical tools. There are no signals emanating from it otherwise, so it is not a beacon, and if it is some sort of downed vessel from an unknown civilization, it is not broadcasting anything we can monitor even as a distress signal, although in any event I would find it inconceivable that such a structure could have flown or even been carried here by any known means of transport or propulsion.”
“Life scan?”
“I get no life-form readings that are not consistent with the natural life of the planet. If anyone’s home, they either do not match any known type of life or they are very well hidden inside that thing.”
“In other words,” the scout muttered, “you, the most sophisticated and knowledgeable device any known technology can create and program to answer any question and hazard, exacting theories on almost any eventuality with a command of facts and data and a thought speed incomprehensibly better than my own—you are telling me, essentially, that my guess is as good as yours. Right?”
“Probably better than mine,” the ship responded. “I do not have nearly your capacity for wild flights of imagination.”
“So it’s not a spaceship, not a cargo module, not a house built with materials found on the planet, either. So how did it get there?”
“I would not presume to guess. It has been there quite a while, though. It is definitely buried in rock and soil to a fair depth, and there is no sign of construction or melting or other alterations. A good bet is that it has been there a very long time, and that the rock and soil have formed around it. It has not, however, been overgrown by the surrounding vegetation or covered by volcanic ash or debris. This indicates that there is some kind of maintenance function within it that still works. Again, if one had to speculate, it would appear most likely that the thing contains a system somewhat analogous to my position in this ship. It is entirely possible that the whole structure is some sort of artificial intelligence in a shell, and indeed that may be all that it is.”
“Entirely plausible. You are certain, though, that it is of extraplanetary origin and not merely an unusual feature?”
“Positive. The energy pulses show a clear-cut power source of some kind, and there is some intake and exhaust of gases. Not a sufficient amount to indicate that the whole structure has full atmosphere, but enough to suggest that at least a small pan of it has. It would be interesting to get close enough to analyze the gases it expels.”
“Then let’s get close enough. Roll in a remote unit and let’s see just what it’s made of and what its reactions might be to an approach. How long will it take?”
“I have already constructed and programmed such a unit, anticipating your actions. However, it is now past dark down mere in its area, and I would suggest a daytime foray. Get some food and rest. In the morning we shall test this thing’s mettle.”
The probe dropped fairly close to the object, in part to see if that would provoke any reaction from it. No scans or other transmissions were detected, and the probe settled to its point just slightly off the ground and proceeded slowly toward the artifact as Cymak and his monitoring computer watched on the screens above.
From ground level, the long, exposed end, which sometimes looked like the rough end of a crystal shard and sometimes like a depression, looked very much the latter, almost a tunnel ringed by sixteen even facets of crystalline substance leading back to a single black point that might or might not have been an entrance of some kind.
The probe did not at first try an approach to that point, but instead rose up and did as much of a survey of the exterior as it could. The initial measurements held up; it was a hair over forty meters in length, seemingly embedded or wedded to the bedrock, the exposed portion a bit under four meters high from ground level. There were no observable or measurable openings, but it did seem to “bleed” gases in the broken, or entry, end, almost as if it were somehow selectively porous. The region of atmospheric bleed or exchange went in a bit over six meters and then stopped abruptly.
“Definitely some sort of atmospheric chamber,” the ship told him. “It might be the entire inhabitable life zone within the object, or it might be the only one that requires it. At the far end are two isolated spots giving off heat—not a lot, but definitely indicating a coolant mechanism—and that’s it.”
“See if you can take a sample and analyze it,” Cymak suggested, more fascinated than worried.
The probe settled down on top of the structure, anchored itself on three tight suction feet, then extended a small-core drill and attempted to take a small sample. It didn’t happen. All the drill did was whirl around and begin to melt in the frustration of going against something harder than its bit, even though the bit was made of the hardest substance known to the Xymanth.
“Whatever it is, it’s not quartz,” the computer commented.
“Obviously. Well, it’s almost certainly an exercise in futility, but run through all the tests and see if we can come up with anything.”
Burning, controlled blasting, laser, and other tests proved equally futile, proving Cymak correct. The computer spent four hours doing everything it could to the object and at the end of that time they knew just as much as they had before they began.
“One thing is certain—if we could figure out its composition and duplicate it, we’d have the perfect enclosure and building material,” Cymak said, “Something built with this stuff would be the first construction that really would last down through the ages.”
“I am not at all certain it is the material,” the ship responded. “I just took another series of measurements and they differ slightly from our earlier ones. Not in gross proportions—we are talking slight changes here—but definitely different. In fact, I have now completed a third pass and it is different still, yet the surface is not moving at all. It is very much as if the object is indeed changing its shape slightly and almost constantly, yet I can not directly measure such a change in progress. It is almost as if the thing were not—quite—totally in our universe. As if our physical laws don’t quite apply to it.”
The Xymanth was surprised. “You mean—another universe? That it has somehow poked into our universe without quite losing contact with its own?”
“In layman’s terms, that is about it. If it were not quite in phase with us, either temporally or in some other dimensional level, that would explain why it seems impervious to all that we have tried to do to it.”
“Is that possible?”
“I have never heard of such a thing, but at a guess, faced with reality, I can find no other theory that might explain all its properties. We know very little of the geometry of parallel universes. We exceed the speed of light and travel as far as we do because we know some of the properties and topology of one, but here we may be touching a different one. That theory explains much, if true, although I have never heard of such an intersection actually being discovered. It would certainly explain the properties and characteristics of this object, as well as how it got here. Whoever or whatever built this thing did not fly it here, they simply moved it to a parallel intersection point and shoved it through. To what purpose, however, I cannot speculate.”
The Xymanth thought about that for a moment. “I might hazard a guess. What is our logical next move?”
“Why, to try to gain entry, of course.”
“Yes. I am reminded of the mothryx traps of my own people. Weblike constructs that one lays upon the ground, partly concealed, with a one-way entrance. The mothryx comes along, crawls in the entry, and is trapped there. The trapper then comes along later and the meal is locked inside, fresh and preserved. A random probe from a curious race able to do this on a far larger and more sophisticated scale might serve the same purpose. It is simply here, attracting attention by virtue of its being unlike anything else, waiting for the unwary or the overly curious to crawl inside.”
“A fascinating theory. Shall we test it?”
“By all means.”
“It might be fruitless no matter what. If the thing is out of sync with our space-time matrix, then transmissions from within it may be impossible.”
The Xymanth had thought of that. “If so, it will be most disappointing, but then we will transmit what we have and leave it to the military and the Exploiter Teams to deal with. Proceed.”
The probe moved forward again, then down, facing now that forward region that looked like quartz shards from above, but like a gaping mouth from level ground. The ship re-angled a repeater so that signals broadcast horizontally from the probe might be caught and retransmitted upwards, then sent the probe carefully on its way toward the black spot at the center of the shard walls.
“My sophisticated measuring devices are going mad,” the ship reported, “but the basics are holding. Atmospheric pressure constant, temperature rising but slightly, visual breaking up on direct but holding well with the repeater. Distance, however, is skewed. According to my readout we have already traversed the length of the object and yet we are just now approaching the entrance.”
“It would be a pretty elaborate joke if it took us in and immediately expelled us out the other end,” Cymak commented. “A single door.”
On the screens that “door” now loomed wide, its edges regular, but the blackness was not a hole into the interior but rather a tough-looking membrane. The probe stopped perhaps centimeters from the surface and extended a small silvery handlike probe to first push against the seal and then to use its three “fingers” to attempt to sample the material. It did not get the chance to do the latter, for at its touch the membrane seemed to rotate counterclockwise and fall back.
“An iris,” the ship noted. “At least we are welcomed in.”
“Yes,” agreed the scout, “but welcomed in to where? Can that be the interior of the thing? It is huge.”
“As I surmised, the object is not fully within our continuum,” the ship commented with some satisfaction. “The constancy of our signal transmission is the only bridge we now have to wherever the probe actually is. I cannot get accurate measurements; the figures shift wildly now, far greater than the exterior measurements, yet I believe my instruments are actually functioning. They were simply never designed to measure something this alien to our experience.”
It was a great chamber made of the same quartzlike material as the exterior, but it was irregular, with great columns of crystal rising from floor to ceiling like majestic towers, each illuminated with a cold inner light that was crimson in some, golden in others, and blue and green and colors without names that Cymak could speak. The overall effect was quite beautiful.
The floor was uneven, almost a miniature rolling terrain, the ceiling no more regular than the floor, and the walls seemed to curve this way and that, all catching the light from the columns and blending, twisting, and distorting it into rainbows of color that were not still but slowly writhing back and forth, in and out.
“It is not the light sources that are pulsing or changing,” the ship noted. “Rather the walls, floor, ceiling, even the columns are subtly shifting in size and shape as we go through. I believe that to be an illusion produced by our inability to see and measure such conditions accurately. This geometry has been heretofore theoretical in nature. My best guess is that my initial theory was wrong; this thing does not exist outside of our continuum but rather in a multitude of continua simultaneously, ours included. I think it is a tesseract of some sort, although how one would build such a thing and make it real and accessible is beyond any knowledge our world possesses.”
“Far more interesting than how is why someone would build it,” Cymak commented, fascinated. “And, for that matter, who.”
“There are inner chambers. I am having problems with transmissions now on a level and scale for which I might not be able to compensate for very long. Still, we will explore so long as we have some sort of control and line to the probe. I fear, though, that if transmission is cut for any time, even a few nanoseconds, we might lose any chance of recall. We will try the nearest central chamber and see what we might see.” The probe went forward, the images becoming jerky on the screen, more like a succession of still frames than a moving picture, as it crossed into the new chamber.
“Less illumination here,” the ship reported. “I think I . . . ”
Conversation stopped. Cymak felt his breathing stop too as the contents of the smaller center chamber suddenly came into sharp focus.
It was a dark room, with but two great pillars in the center. Both were illuminated fully by inner yellow light, but this time they were not at all transparent. Suspended within the columns like insects in amber were—things.
Cymak had never been religious. His people had too many gods, like most races, none of whom had done anything particularly for those who invoked them or asked their blessings, but in whose name a lot of wrongs were often committed. Now, however, he was beginning to reevaluate those opinions.
The Empire controlled thousands of worlds upon which hundreds of races had settled, born before and after they had been absorbed into the Empire. The races were of every conceivable shape and form and type; they breathed water and methane and lots of other junk as well, and some were so alien from the rest that they were barely comprehensible to outsiders. And yet, somehow, all had developed at one time in their past theologies and cosmologies, many as different as night and day and even more incomprehensible, but with a curious single commonalty among them that had fascinated and puzzled anthropologists from the start.
The pair in the columns were that commonalty in the flesh.
Each stood perhaps two and a half meters high. Their feet were great cloven hoofs; their legs, slightly bowed, were covered with thick purplish hair to the midriff, while their chests were bare, dark and hard-looking, almost like bone rather than skin. The arms came down from great, broad shoulders and seemed much too long, furred like the legs, but terminating in great clawed hands. The faces were skeletal masks, grinning horrors with broad, clownish mouths, snoutlike nostrils, and large, dark eyes that seemed almost as black as space, set off by thick purple brows angled down toward the bridge of the nose forming a connected, thick V shape. From their heads grew ugly, misshapen horns.
Their descriptions varied slightly from race to race and even from culture to culture within a race, yet none would have had any more difficulty than Cymak in instantly recognizing them for what they were.
“By the gods of my ancestors,” he breathed. “Demons!”
The ship’s computer was equally impressed intellectually, but did not carry the burden of having grown up in a sentient culture, acquiring along the way a bit of nerves about monsters and bogeymen.
“They are not quite identical, other than the obvious differences in the horn length and shape and the fact that the one on the left is a bit shorter and thinner,” the computer noted clinically. “The briefs they are wearing make it impossible to tell for certain, but there is a possibility that they are a mated pair. Calm down, Cymak—they are definitely embedded in the stuff and certainly not about to come to life.”
The Xymanth, however his rational mind insisted that he’d simply happened on a major discovery, could not shake the feeling that he had instead intruded on a temple of the truly supernatural. The strangeness of the object, its less than solid nature, its bizarre shiftings, and now demons . . .
Almost every race had such demons, and almost without exception they represented all that was truly evil and malevolent in the universe. This pattern also held true among the races of the Mizlaplan, as he well knew, even up to the Mizlaplan themselves, who had set themselves up as gods. Only the Mycohl regarded the ancient and apparently universal demon figure as an agency of good, but the Mycohl had always been perverse.
“This is a discovery of monumental proportions,” the ship enthused. “For centuries we have looked for traces of the demon figures as early common visitors to the races of ancient days, but in vain. Now, here at last, is proof that they exist—that demons are a real, unknown, perhaps very advanced race. We shall go down in the history books for this, Cymak!”
“Break it off,” the Xymanth said with firmness. “Pull the probe out—now.”
“But I want to—”
“Do as I say!”
“Very well,” the ship responded with a very human sigh. “Get hold of yourself, though. You have traveled farther and seen more and fought more than any two others alive or dead. You can not allow yourself to be undone now by silly superstitions and psychological leftovers from your childhood.”
“They are evil!” Cymak snapped. “Remember that! Almost universally they are the symbols of pure evil! And that, too, must have a reason, an origin in antiquity that has been passed down to us as a warning!”
“Evil is relative. Besides, the Mycohl consider them good.”
“And what sort of society and values do the Mycohl represent? That evil should worship evil is hardly shocking. No, pack it up and get it ready for transmission without delay.”
“So you are not so frightened of two apparently dead ancient ones that you will not report it.”
“I dare not ignore it. It is unlikely that we could destroy it or cover it up, and if I don’t stake this planet, then a Mycohl scout or a Mizlaplanian group will stumble upon it. I just pray that those who come after to study this will not loose a horror upon us all that has been kept bound here for millennia. So, sound a recall and prepare the report. We will do no more work here ourselves.”
“Very well. I would not worry so much, though. It is by now mere archaeology, mere objects of study. That pair is long dead and preserved here as in a grave site. If we accept, as is generally agreed, that memories of demons among so many different races so far apart were caused by some ancient visitations, it must have been tens of thousands of years ago. No one except priests, psychics, and psychotics has seen a demon in the flesh since then.”
“It is not a grave site,” Cymak responded firmly. “Graves are sealed among those who use them. They are not maintained in chambers of an unknown technology still active and responsive to visitors. And ten thousand years ago this was a far different place—certainly geologically, and probably climatologically as well. Our figures show a minor ice age in between. Yet there it sits, still active, still working, with its terrible inhabitants frozen there, not buried in rock or overgrown by vegetation, its door open in full operational condition. That thing is alive, at least as much as you yourself are alive, and perhaps more so. Still alive, still active, still functional, and smart enough to keep from being buried or embedded or undercut or overgrown through the centuries. I fear this is a discovery I will rue until my death.”
“Perhaps. It will certainly shake things up, anyway. All is prepared and organized. Do you wish to review it before I transmit?”
“No, I know what a good job you do. Send it, but append this from me. Say, ‘I, Cymak, Scout of the Exchange, send you evil from Rainbow Bridge.’ Say—say, ‘Here be demons!’ ”
Soap Opera for SpacersJONAH AND THE WORM
The Erotics had zeroed in on him now, but while he’d watched their dancing with enthusiasm and wondered once again what it must feel like to have a tail like that, he wasn’t at all interested in the follow-up.
One of them, maybe senior, nosed out the rest and headed over toward him with all the sass and sexy moves she had. She had all of them. He watched her come, resigned, and drained the last of his drink. No loss there; in a place where everybody was drinking and popping all the wrong stuff, he was limited to fruit juice.
Up close, she was no less erotic but far less human; what seemed almost a stage costume from afar took on a far different cast when you could see that it was no costume but truly her. In the capital of the central world of an empire encompassing hundreds of races spawned by incredibly divergent evolutionary forces, she nonetheless seemed artificial, unreal, like some kind of animated stage prop created by some bizarre artist.
Which, in a way, was just what she was.
She was almost as tall as he was, taller with that thick mane of hair rising from her head and sweeping behind, although he was, to be sure, rather short and thin himself. Her skin was light brown, her face and torso out of some adolescent male’s fantasies, the eyes unnaturally large, the lips too thick and sensuous, the face and form perfect, the breasts ridiculously oversized and far too large to be as firm as they were, the nipples ever erect.
The brows, however, were thin and angled upwards; the blush and eye shadow were not cosmetic but part of her, and above the outer edge of each eye, about midway between the eye and the hairline, were tiny, perfectly rounded short horns.
She had no navel; about where the navel should have been was a covering of short, incredibly soft darker brown hair that went down to her feet. Her hips were a bit odd-shaped and supported two thick legs that were somehow both equine and sexy, ending not in human feet but in two graceful hooves. From the small of her back trailed a magnificent golden tail of the sort that he’d seen on show horses when he was a kid back on his native world; her hair spilled down her back in the same color and style.
She slid up to him. “Hey, bad boy—want a feelie?”
He looked at her. Only something beyond the painted eyes, deep inside her, revealed her hardness, her many years at this trade, and her sense of entrapment in it.
“Nothing tonight, luv,” he responded. “Just here for the scenery and the atmosphere, nothin’ more. Maybe some other time.”
She’d been around too long to take that as a final brushoff. “Aw, c’mon, big man. You got needs and I can fill ’em.”
‘”Shove off!” he said in such a tone that she actually took a step back. Coldly, but less threatening, he added, “You with all your years got no idea of my needs. Go find a paying customer and get happy.”
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